Dimitri Van Limbergen

Devi Taelman

Adeline Hoffelinck

This book focuses on those features of the Roman economy that are less traceable in text and archaeology, and as a consequence remain largely underexplored in contemporary scholarship. By reincorporating, for the first time, these long-obscured practices in mainstream scholarly discourses, this book offers a more complete and balanced view of an economic system that for too long has mostly been studied through its macro-economic and large-scale – and thus archaeologically and textually omnipresent – aspects. The topic is approached in five thematic sections, covering unusual actors and perspectives, unusual places of production, exigent landscapes of exploitation, less-visible products and artefacts, and divergent views on emblematic economic spheres. To this purpose, the book brings together a select group of leading scholars and promising early career researchers in archaeology and ancient economic history, well positioned to steer this ill-developed but fundamental field of the Roman economy in promising new directions.

New Perspectives on Habitual Economic Practices

Reframing the Roman Economy

Frank Vermeulen

Patrick Monsieur

The Potenza Valley Survey (Marche, Italy). Settlement Dynamics and Changing Material Culture in an Adriatic Valley Between Iron Age and Late Antiquity

Sadi Maréchal

Wim De Clercq

The Resilience ofthe Roman Empire discusses therelationship between population and regional development in the Roman worldfrom the perspective of archaeology. By adapting a comparative approach, thefocus of the volume lies on exploring the various ways in which regionalcommunities actively responded to population growth or decline in order to keepgoing on the land available to them. The starting point of the theoreticalframework for the case studies is the agricultural intensification modelsdeveloped by Thomas Malthus and Ester Boserup. In order to advance the debateon the validity of these models for identifying the societal and economicpathways of the Roman world, the contributors incorporate the concepts ofresilience and diversity into their approach, and shift attention from thelongue-durée to how people managed to sustain themselves over shorter periodsof time. The aim of the volume is not to discard the theories of Malthus andBoserup, but rather to deconstruct overly strict Malthusian or Boserupianscenarios, and as such introduce novel and more layered ways of thinking byexploring resilience and variability in human responses to populationgrowth/decline in the Roman world.

Regional Case Studies on the Relationship Between Population and Food Resources

The Resilience of the Roman Empire

Dimitri Van Limbergen

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